[Ecks]

A new museum in Helsingborg displays more than 70 failed products and objects, including the Apple Newton, Google Glass, Sony Betamax, Harley-Davidson perfume and the Donald Trump board game. According to curator Samuel West, "none of the companies that I contacted wanted to cooperate. I approached quite a few innovation directors and asked them for examples of failure that they've learned from. I thought it would be easy to get them to collaborate but none of them choose to cooperate."

Read more : http://failuremag.com/article/museum-of-...-in-sweden

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This is pretty hilarious. I would think this museum would be a good educational experience for entrepreneurs and design students etc. Opportunity to learn from other's mistakes?

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Well that is the idea behind it to show everyone makes mistakes and to help people do better, but companies can be severly butthurt about failures and do everything in their power to pretend and deny they ever did fail.

[Jiggly]

Well that is the idea behind it to show everyone makes mistakes and to help people do better, but companies can be severly butthurt about failures and do everything in their power to pretend and deny they ever did fail.

That's as much as I suspected. I feel like those companies could probably do with taking their interns and new employees to the museum too (for those with relevant positions). Although, I wonder if there are other reasons they may not be keen to cooperate.

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Failure means lost revenue, lost revenue means angry board, angry board means layoffs, layoffs mean stock drops, stock drop means lost revenue.
Vicious cycle so it is easier to ignore and deny then to admit and find a way to move forward, sort of reminds me of the old saying "Easier to ask forgiveness than for permission".

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I had to laugh at this:

I hear that when you registered the domain name for the Museum of Failure you misspelled it. Is that true?

Yeah, alcohol is partially to blame. I got so excited in Zagreb that I went to the nearest bar and had a couple beers and I bought the domain name using my phone. I was surprised that museumoffailure.com wasn’t already taken; turns out it was taken, I just didn’t spell museum right—I had switched the “e” and the “u.”

On topic, I believe this Is a good thing. Not only will the failed products benefit the consumer by way of Informing, but It's developers can learn by their errors and better both themselves and their products.

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I fully agree, failure is a major part of innovation and many of todays best selling products are failed creations that have been re-purposed. Anyone in a scientific field will tell you the same. But on the business level failure is frowned upon, it is a failed investment of capitol, regardless of what was learned or gained from it, spending money on something and having it fail is simply not viable in business, so almost all business' pretend failures don't happen and go out of their way to try and forget or deny these failures. From the medical field to game production you will almost never find a company admitting its mistakes, unless the product became a wild success for something else (ie. Viagra/Teflon/etc).